Congratulations New Hampshire: RSA 91-A Is Finally Dead

At long last, New Hampshire municipalities may finally breathe easy.

No more annoying Right-to-Know requests.

No more worrying about whether meetings complied with RSA 91-A.

No more concerns about secret deliberations, missing records, or inconvenient constitutional limitations.

Thanks to the groundbreaking work of Donahue, Tucker & Ciandella, attorney Christopher Hawkins, Judge Andrew Schulman, and the New Hampshire Supreme Court, local governments may have finally discovered the ultimate solution:

Just pay citizens to give up their rights.

It is brilliant, really.

Why comply with the Right-to-Know Law when public agencies can simply negotiate agreements restricting future requests, then spend taxpayer money defending those agreements in court?

Why tolerate persistent citizens demanding records when municipalities can now apparently convert constitutional disputes into settlement negotiations?

The possibilities are endless.

Town officials everywhere should be celebrating.

School districts can finally budget for “public silence agreements.”

Police departments may someday save enormous time by resolving transparency disputes with carefully drafted contracts instead of lawful disclosure.

Town managers no longer need fear controversial emails becoming public. Simply enter into a settlement agreement, call it dispute resolution, and let municipal counsel explain why public policy somehow no longer applies.

And think of the opportunities for lawyers.

Municipal defense attorneys across New Hampshire should be clicking their heels with excitement at the prospect of billing taxpayers to defend a government entity’s newly discovered right to purchase peace from citizens asserting RSA 91-A claims.

Why stop there?

Perhaps towns can someday offer tiered transparency packages.

Bronze Package: citizen agrees not to file requests for six months.

Silver Package: no future complaints to the Ombudsman.

Gold Package: permanent waiver of all public-records activity plus confidentiality language.

After all, if one citizen’s statutory rights can be negotiated away through settlement, why not everyone’s?

Who needs constitutional principles when there are billable hours to protect?

Of course, some old-fashioned people may still cling to outdated ideas — like the notion that municipalities possess only limited legal authority, or that public access rights belong to the citizens collectively and therefore cannot simply be traded away in private agreements.

But thankfully, those concerns appear increasingly quaint.

The real achievement here is larger than one case.

Pandora’s Box has been opened.

The message sent to public bodies is unmistakable: even if an agreement raises profound constitutional questions, even if public policy appears directly implicated, even if the authority for the agreement is doubtful at best, aggressive litigation and sufficient taxpayer funding may still carry the day.

And what a lesson that is for the people of New Hampshire.

Not that government must obey the law equally.

Not that constitutional protections remain sacred.

But that persistence by citizens can be met not with transparency, but with legal machinery designed to exhaust, punish, and ultimately deter further scrutiny.

If this truly is the future of RSA 91-A, then perhaps New Hampshire should stop calling it the Right-to-Know Law altogether.

Maybe “The Right-to-Settle-Away Law” would be more accurate.